One of Google's many ideas to combat review fraud was to tie reviews to Google+ profiles. It should be possible to pick out anyone who left one of these fake reviews and remove their rankings from the Play store for all apps.

I can't help but wonder if there is a better way than stars and reviews for measuring an app's worth? Could Google report on how many people have kept the app installed, or how often it's used, or how long it is used for, whether people share the app? All of these, of course, could be gamed - but it would be much harder for a spammer to convince someone to actually regularly use an app.

And although the Smart TV Alliance is attempting to create an industry standard platform, the core tenet of integration with content is still missing. For example, a common social environment for sharing, discussing (and ultimately creating) TV programming will be impossible with random-format platforms. Content providers and developers want a large installed base of devices before they create content for a platform.

Without an industry standard, various "flavors" of Android-based smart TV platforms will be created, along with the iOS ecosystem, which creates a dilemma for the app/content developers. Just look at the video game industry.

Myer used to be president of Sony Digital Media in the US, and before that worked at DirecTV. (Thanks #ClarkeViper for the link.)

bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.

This was a utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. Internet marketing has transformed commerce. The entertainment industries have been transformed by things like MySpace and YouTube, and are now more open to outsiders. Mass media has changed dramatically, and some of the most influential people in the media have come from the blogging world. There are new ways to organize politically and run elections. Crowdfunding has made tens of thousands of projects possible to finance, and crowdsourcing made more types of projects possible. Facebook and Twitter really did help topple governments.

But that is just one side of the Internet's disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well.

According to a security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, Thursday's compromise caused some php.net visitors to download "Tepfer," a trojan spawned by the Magnitude Exploit Kit. At the time of the php.net attacks, the malware was detected by only five of 47 antivirus programs. An analysis of the pcap file suggests the malware attack worked by exploiting a vulnerability in Adobe Flash, although it's possible that some victims were targeted by attacks that exploited Java, Internet Explorer, or other applications, Martijn Grooten, a security researcher for Virus Bulletin, told Ars.

Microsoft has confirmed that there's an issue with its built-in Twitter feature that could result in unexpected data usage. The issue stems from a Twitter back-end change that has caused Windows Phones to re-download the profile images for Twitter contacts frequently. Twitter is currently transitioning its profile pictures from one server to another, and The Verge discovered the data use problem nearly a week ago and reported it to the software giant.

On one of our own Windows Phone devices we found that the People hub, the section that hosts the built-in Twitter client, had used over 300MB of mobile data and over 3GB of Wi-Fi data in just under a week…

Microsoft is working to address the issue, but as it's a backend Twitter change the company is limited in how it can best address it. Removing a Twitter account from a Windows Phone will prevent the excessive data use fully until Twitter has completed its server migration in the coming weeks. Microsoft has also implemented a change to only sync Twitter accounts once a day to reduce the impact.

James Darling, currently working in the civil service, with a powerful (and personal) point of view:

I have a suspicion. I suspect that the idea of the public sector not only doing something well but better than most of the private sector offends them. Turns out the best way to piss off market libertarians is to make government work.

Sure, I hear moans from Silicon Roundabout that the government is sucking up all the best talent in London, but while they're saying that, GOV.UK increased signups to the organ donations register by 10,000 every month with just a bit of clever A/B testing as a side project. I could be working on your socially network website that tries to convince parents that fruitshoot isn't awful for their kids (I have actually done that), or I could be doing what I'm doing now, helping bring real change to the office of the public guardian so they can do their job better.

When asked what the next milestone application would be, Elop looked at the bigger picture instead.

"The big moves in technology tend to come when there's a major change in the user interaction model, how you interact with the device," Elop said, referring to the impact of the Xerox Star on the windowed UI and the iPhone on the touch interface. "At a certain point, those new user interaction models are figured out and take hold, and that heralds a whole new generation of experiences. And of course, we're all working vigorously on those types of things, and you'll see us work towards those in the future."